Science
How a Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Affect Tens of Millions Around the Globe
Scientists spent the first weeks of the year on an expedition to Antarctica to study Thwaites Glacier, which is melting at an alarming rate. If it breaks apart entirely, it could push up global sea levels by two feet over the course of several decades, affecting tens of millions worldwide, according to a New York Times analysis.
The maps below show some of the coastal cities at risk and populated, low-lying areas that could be threatened if the glacier were to collapse today.
1.7 million
These are just the minimum effects that Thwaites’s disintegration would be likely to have on the world’s coastlines. As the glacier breaks apart, global warming will raise sea levels even higher by melting the ice from Greenland and causing oceans to expand in volume. And Thwaites acts as a plug, holding back many of the Antarctic glaciers on land around it. If it collapses, they could break apart and spill into the sea as well.
“Eventually it would take out all of the West Antarctic,” said Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State.
Seaside cities all over the world are at risk, but the threat is especially acute in Asia, and includes some of the world’s fastest-growing urban areas, as the map below shows:
The costs of guarding against higher storm surges and more frequent flooding would be huge. One proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect parts of New York City would cost more than $52 billion, a price tag that would be out of reach for much of the world.
“We’ll defend the highest-value places that are defensible, but there will be other places that we don’t,” said Benjamin Strauss, Chief Scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit science organization that produced the elevation models used in this article.
In city after city, the Times’s analysis found that heavily populated areas tend to be near the coasts, as opposed to higher, safer areas.
Shanghai, one of the major cities under threat, already has more than 600,000 residents living below sea level. If average sea levels rose two feet, an additional 4.7 million people would be affected.
Shanghai’s population at each elevation
Like many of the most vulnerable places, Shanghai is situated on a soft, marshy delta, a landscape naturally prone to sinking, although humans often speed up the process by building structures and draining the groundwater below. The city has also been adding and reinforcing seawalls, and replacing concrete with wetland parks to absorb stormwater.
For places like Shanghai, the cost of defending the city is relatively modest compared with its value, said Jochen Hinkel, director of the Global Climate Forum, an international research organization based in Germany. “There’s so much capital concentrated on a small piece of land,” he said.
But not all places have the resources to protect themselves. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is expected to swell to over 50 million people by 2050, and will rely extensively on borrowed money to prepare for the worst.
Dhaka’s population at each elevation
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, is experiencing more volatile monsoons and stronger cyclones as the planet warms. Villages have already been erased as the tides rise and rivers in the region change shape. Saltwater tides have ruined farmland, driving rural residents to the already-crowded capital.
The limits to adaptation
In the United States, a two-foot increase in sea levels wouldn’t affect as many people as in parts of Asia, but the price of adaptation would be astronomical. And even in the wealthiest country in the world, flood defenses aren’t bulletproof.
When the network of pumps and levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the catastrophe killed 1,400 people and displaced more than a million. Recovery in New Orleans has cost about $140 billion. Dozens of smaller communities along the Gulf Coast may not be so lucky.
120,000 people within 2 feet of high tide
Areas protected
by levees
125,000
Coastal cities elsewhere are bracing for higher sea levels. It would cost $13.6 billion to shield part of the San Francisco waterfront. Farther inland in California, it would take $2 billion to improve protections in Stockton. Across the country, a giant barrier at New York City’s harbor could cost $119 billion.
Yet people and buildings continue to accumulate in harm’s way. Miami’s population and real estate values have exploded in recent years, despite the fact that the city is notoriously difficult to protect.
Clearer answers about if, and when, Thwaites could collapse may make all the difference in how well coastal areas are able to adapt. “The value of the information is grotesquely higher than what we’ve invested in it,” Dr. Alley said.
Under President Trump, the United States has abandoned research that could better forecast the effects of Antarctica’s melting ice. It has also promoted the use and burning of fossil fuels, adding to the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet. That could speed up the glacier’s collapse.
The fallout from decisions made today may not be felt immediately, Dr. Strauss said, but “this is what we’re signing up the future for.”
Methodology
The Times’s analysis includes cities with 300,000 residents or more and within 100 miles of the coast.
It used elevation data from Climate Central’s CoastalDEM 3.0 to calculate the average high tides at each location. This model reflects local water levels more accurately than global averages. It used data from the European Commission’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-UCDB) for city boundaries and Worldpop’s 2026 data for population estimates.
The sea level rise scenarios in this article focus only on the effects from Antarctica. The continent is expected to lose its gravitational pull on ocean water as it loses ice. As that happens, parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States and much of Asia, will experience higher-than-average effects in sea level rise than places closer to Antarctica.
The maps and total population numbers are adjusted to reflect this dynamic, using data from Jerry Mitrovica, professor of geophysics at Harvard. They do not account for similar dynamics from Greenland’s ice loss, or for any other influences that may cause an uneven distribution of sea level rise.
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has joined a chorus of California hospitals and health systems lobbying the state for a $500-million emergency payment to public hospitals bracing for massive financial losses.
The California Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems is requesting a one-time general fund payment in the 2026-27 budget to help cover inpatient care for fee-for-service Medi-Cal patients at the state’s 17 public hospitals.
While the exact percentage of the $500 million allocated to each hospital will depend on inpatient claims, the county expects that roughly 25%, or $125 million, will end up at Los Angeles County hospitals, said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of LA Health Services.
“That’s the money that is really necessary to serve as a stopgap and continue that lifeline that the public hospitals desperately need, particularly with the state’s proposed shift of undocumented individuals from managed care into fee-for-service,” Ghaly said.
Ghaly praised county voters for passing Measure ER, which will provide an estimated $220 million annually for the next five years to the county health system through a new half-cent sales tax, Ghaly said.
But it’s not enough to stanch what the county estimates will be a $700-million annual loss by the 2028-29 fiscal year.
LA Health Services is the largest public health system in the state and second-largest in the nation. It serves as a safety net for the county’s 10 million residents, providing healthcare regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.
More than 80% of the system’s patients rely on Medi-Cal, Los Angeles General Medical Center Chief Executive Jorge Orozco told a state Senate committee in March.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law last summer, alters Medicaid eligibility requirements and includes about $1 trillion in federal Medicaid reductions over 10 years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. As a result, California is expected to lose tens of billions in total funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
About 660,000 people in Los Angeles County are expected to lose Medi-Cal coverage, “but they will not stop needing healthcare,” Orozco said in March. “They will still come to our emergency rooms for everything from routine illness to life threatening conditions. And safety net hospital systems like ours will be forced to absorb those costs.”
County health officials have enacted hiring freezes, consolidated services, reduced overtime and taken other cost-cutting measures in anticipation of the losses, resulting in about $230 million in savings.
“But we need to be clear: we cannot cut our way out of a funding loss of this magnitude,” the department said in a statement released this week. “Without help from the State, we will be forced to consider options no one wants, reduced patient services, staff layoffs, and potential facility closures.”
The county has not yet identified specific services for closure, Ghaly said.
“Our focus is entirely on preventing the harm that would come before we have to make those tough choices,” she added.
A memo on the department’s fiscal outlook prepared for the Board of Supervisors sounded the alarm in April.
“For the patients we serve, losing Medi-Cal doesn’t mean they stop getting sick — it means losing access to care. Health Services will still be here, but with over 600,000 more uninsured patients in LA County alone, the strain will be felt across our health system and across every emergency room in Los Angeles County,” the memo read.
“Without substantial new revenue sources, Health Services will have no alternative but to consider planning for service curtailments — including possible facility closures and staff layoffs — beginning in early 2027.”
new video loaded: Southern Lights Seen From International Space Station
By Cynthia Silva
June 10, 2026
Science
UC Davis favored less qualified Black, Latino med school applicants, Justice Department claims
The U.S. Justice Department has accused the UC Davis School of Medicine of choosing race “over merit, skill, and competence” in its admissions process, favoring Black and Latino students even when they weren’t as qualified as white and Asian applicants.
The department said its findings, announced Wednesday afternoon, were based on a six-month investigation by its Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department said it found that the Northern California university violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based determinations in admissions. The findings have been contested by the school.
“Davis Med’s actions reflect both unabashed contempt for the rule of law and plain disregard for the potential public health consequences of putting race over merit, skill, and competence,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“The Department will not allow schools to violate federal law without consequence.”
A spokesperson said the university was “disappointed” with the report and its findings.
“UC Davis School of Medicine strongly disagrees with any characterization of its admissions practices as discriminatory or inconsistent with applicable law,” a school statement read. “The report’s findings do not accurately reflect the school’s rigorous, individualized, and merit-based admissions process and our firm commitment to complying with applicable federal and state antidiscrimination laws.”
The department outlined its case in a 12-page letter to an attorney representing UC Davis, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
Title VI prohibits institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating based on race, while the 2023 decision banned affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
The Justice Department said its investigation found the medical school “adopted admissions practices with the express purpose of circumventing” the 2023 ruling.
That method was the “Davis Scale,” the department said. The letter called the scale a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage” that includes parental income and education, growing up in a medically underserved area and other socioeconomic variables.
The Justice Department included UC Davis literature that said the scale had allowed the school to triple the enrollment of Black and Latino students.
In 2024, Davis’ medical school became the third most racially diverse medical school in the country, the Justice Department claimed.
Conversely, the department said its review of medical school admissions data from 2023 to 2025 found that 93% of white and certain Asian applicants had MCAT scores at or above those of the average Black student.
It also showed that Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than whites and Asians, despite consistently having, on average, lower academic qualifications, according to the department.
The Justice Department said it is attempting to enter into a voluntary agreement with UC Davis to bring the medical school into compliance. The department would eventually sue the medical school if such a resolution is not found.
UC Davis did not indicate whether it would comply with the Justice Department.
“UC Davis is fully committed to meeting the critical healthcare needs of California, particularly those in underserved and under-resourced areas,” the school said in a statement.
The finding mirrors similar investigations into medical schools at UCLA and UC San Diego.
The Justice Department said last month that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine intentionally used race for the last three years to discriminate against white and Asian applicants during admissions.
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